Wierdest problem I have ever seen...

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alkit

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[SOLVED] Wierdest problem I have ever seen...

Hi,
I just encountered the wierdest computer problem, and was hoping someone could tell me where the problem lies:
My friend has a faulty IDE hard drive that would cause his PC to reboot every time the OS tried to boot.
So I decided to plug the hard drive into my own PC to test whether it was the hard drive or my friend's PC at fault.
Lo and behold, it gave me the same problem in my PC, and it kept rebooting while the hard drive was plugged in.

So... I unplugged the faulty hard drive from my PC, and my OWN hard drive wont boot. It tells me to insert boot disk!!! It wont even boot off a CD! This is what happens when Hard Drive is set to the first boot device.

Now comes the strange part. I figured out that if I set the CD-ROM as the FIRST boot drive, then put an XP BOOT CD in the cd-rom drive, then it will try boot off the cd, and then it will boot off the hard drive without any issue.

STRANGE! Anyone got any ideas as to why?
 
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well done lol. My friend has that same thing but he didn't get it from migrating a hardrive from one pc to another though. Have you got a sata drive? Reset your CMOS on your board and see if that works.
 
Check and see if your bios didn't change the boot sequence. I know with my new board every time I plug in a hard drive, it changes the boot order. Just a thought.
 
Spooner said:
well done lol. My friend has that same thing but he didn't get it from migrating a hardrive from one pc to another though. Have you got a sata drive? Reset your CMOS on your board and see if that works.
Click to expand...

Thanks a ton! Seems like resetting the CMOS fixed the problem.
Thanks!
 
Had this problem before. Exact same. Here's why it happens and how to fix it:

When you shuffled the hdds around, you changed the slot your primary drive plugs into the board, so now your MB gives it a different slot name. Your PC then checks for drive 0 , which is now probably your CD-Drive, which it thinks is the hdd. Fix is easy. Shuffle the cables around till you get your hdd back to device 0, usually the SATA1 plug.

Hope it helps :D
 
agentrfr said:
Had this problem before. Exact same. Here's why it happens and how to fix it:

When you shuffled the hdds around, you changed the slot your primary drive plugs into the board, so now your MB gives it a different slot name. Your PC then checks for drive 0 , which is now probably your CD-Drive, which it thinks is the hdd. Fix is easy. Shuffle the cables around till you get your hdd back to device 0, usually the SATA1 plug.

Hope it helps :D
Click to expand...

Thanks a ton, but seems like something else was at fault in my case.

Firstly, my hard drive is an IDE drive.
Secondly, I used the exact same IDE cable when I plugged the hard drive back in (unless it makes a difference as which part of the IDE cable I plugged in, but seeing as there is only 1 drive on that IDE channel, I don't think it would matter)

Thanks anyway for the info and the help!
 
Secondly, I used the exact same IDE cable when I plugged the hard drive back in (unless it makes a difference as which part of the IDE cable I plugged in, but seeing as there is only 1 drive on that IDE channel, I don't think it would matter)
Click to expand...
It does matter, specially when you have "cable select" jumper settings.

The one part of the cable on the very end should always be IDE master. Not just because of cable select but it is good practice on IDE devices, the one below it obviously IDE slave.
 
MyWorld said:
It does matter, specially when you have "cable select" jumper settings.

The one part of the cable on the very end should always be IDE master. Not just because of cable select but it is good practice on IDE devices, the one below it obviously IDE slave.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, good to know!
I usually just set the master and slave (and I don't do CS), and I just plug the cable in to whichever order if fits the best (usually CD-Drive at the end part of the cable, and HDD in the middle part of the cable).

Anyway, soon this will all be irrelevant as SATA is the only way to go these days :)
 
Though the cable issue is possible, it's almost certainly not the problem.

On startup, Windows checks all drives to see which has a primary active partition. Since you booted your system with two primary active partitions, Windows disables the first one and boots the second (assuming that if you added a second primary active partition then that's the one you prefer). This is done before the NT Executive is loaded and waaay before the GUI.

NEVER EVER BOOT A SYSTEM WITH TWO PRIMARY ACTIVE WINDOWS PARTITIONS.

Your normal active primary partition has been marked as inactive. You can change that using tools like Super FDisk, or Partition Table Doctor, and others. You'll need to get a bootable tool and mark your usual disk primary partition as active. I have a paid-for tool, but am sure there are many freeware goodies out there. Bing for answers.
 
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